How To Build A Cult Like Following in 100 Days

Build a Cult Following with the Lower Down Sickness Challenge I'm going to teach you guys in this podcast how to build a cult like following over the next 100 days. The reason that I am motivated to have this conversation is because I just launched a challenge on Instagram and Tiktok, one that I invite all of you to do. I'm going to talk about the challenge 1st and I'm going to talk about how it pertains to building a cult like following. So the challenge, I'm calling it the lower down sickness challenge. So you hashtag lower down sickness challenge on your post so that it's a part of the part of the challenge. The reason I'm calling it this is because my best friend Michael has the higher up Wellness challenge and it's you talk for a minute about a topic, position yourself as authority, get better at public speaking in 100 days. So I said, what's the opposite of higher up Wellness? The opposite is lower down sickness. Ha, ha, he, he. But it is literally the exact opposite of what that challenge is. So this challenge is you make a video. The video must not be longer than 30 seconds. It has to be less than 30 seconds. And it has to be a polarizing view that you have about something or anything in the world. And you're going to slowly over the 100 days, you're going to increase the bravery, so to speak, that you have with allowing people to see exactly who you are and what you stand for in the world. Now, every time I talk about having a controversial stance, people immediately default to, well, I don't want to just piss people off for the sake of pissing them off. I don't want to do that. But that's not what controversial means. Change the word controversial and replace it with the word conversational. So a couple examples of controversial stances. Pineapple does not belong on pizza. Now, I'm not going to explain it. I'm not going to say pineapple doesn't belong on pizza because in Italy. But no, no, no, I'm explaining myself. The whole point of this challenge is to say what you believe in, speak your truth, speak your view and give no need to explain yourself. That's very hard for a lot of people. That's why a lot of people struggle with their content, because they say the same thing 15 different ways because they feel they need to explain themselves. This is the exposure therapy. So instead of me saying pineapple doesn't belong on pizza, I can make it more fun and I can say I don't trust a single person that puts pineapple on their pizza. Clearly you are someone that does not respect culture. Post. That's it. No question, no debate, no explaining myself, just this is my view. Ha ha he he delivered another example. Summer is far superior to winter. I don't care what anybody says. Post then you can start increasing difficulty. Maybe you start talking about how I'm a Delta snot when I fly. So I could say I have flown so many airlines and it is incomprehensible to me that anybody would ever choose to fly an airline that's not DD is #1 by far no questions. Ask anybody who thinks otherwise just doesn't fly enough. Post then I could go a little bit more intense. The people who always drink alcohol every single weekend. Those are people that just hate their lives. Otherwise they'd be doing something more effective on their weekends. Post. Oh now we're stirring the pot. Every time I go viral my team has this joke. Anytime I want to get 1,000,000 views on a video I say a man should always pay on the first date. That's my stance. Whatever I say. If a man asks you out on the date, is he obligated to pay for it? Yes. No questions. If he doesn't, find another man post and I'll keep going more and more and more because I'm going to give myself more permission to be seen. As you continue to post, you get more brave. But your audience, this is something that's important. If you're in my audience and I make a post talking about how Kiwis are the superior fruit or I made a post that went viral saying I hated papaya and people in my audience were posting about how they loved papaya and I was crazy and I got to have fun and poke back at them. I'm like, no, no, no, you're crazy. I don't believe you for a second. You guys are all in on this. You guys are just punking me. You're playing and I joke and I ha ha back and forth. And what happens is I'm training my audience to understand that it is OK and almost fun that we have opposing beliefs on things. So I start small. And as I'm creating exposure therapy for myself, I'm also creating exposure therapy for my audience. Then I can increase difficulty. And if you do this every day for 100 days, this is my challenge. This is what I'm telling you. You want to build a cult like following on 100 days. It's going to be challenging. It's going to be hard because this is Part 2 of this. Why Neutrality Leads to Invisibility and Attracts a Mob If you want to build a cult, everything has its opposing side. So if you build a cult, you are also at the same time going to build a mob. The cult is going to go to war for you. The mob is going to go war to war at you. You cannot have one without the other. If you are consistently trying to position yourself as a business owner or anything on social media with neutrality. Neutrality is invisibility. You will not be seen. People will not have an emotional charge to what you're talking about. No, emotional charges are not negative. Your job right now is to see and observe everything that I say. If you immediately default that to a negative, that is your programming and conditioning that needs to be unwound. That's what's keeping you stuck. So I say you need to post stuff that's emotionally charged and you say, but I don't want people to get mad at me. I didn't say that. I want to post things that make people feel so emotionally invested in what I'm talking about that they almost get teared up thinking about how much truth I'm delivering to them. I want them to feel so emotionally seen and so-called out in the best way that they say, man, Nick is speaking directly to me. And I get it now, because if I can speak to those people, the other people who are not willing or ready to accept their own dysfunction are going to turn into a mob and they're going to try to tear me down because that is the only scenario that makes them feel good about themselves. It's not that I am a bad person per SE. It is that people who disagree with a truth that they cannot possibly fathom exists for them. They have to create you into a bad person because then it gives them the safety to not have to listen to what you're saying. If you are bad, if you are egotistical, if you are narcissistic, if you are whatever they label you, then they say I don't have to validate anything that person says, even if what that person says triggers me. Control Your Own Narrative: The Power of Removing the Mask OK, When you can understand 1000 different versions of you exist in the world. Probably more than that. There are people who will tell you that I am the best thing that ever happened to them. There are people that will tell you I'm the worst thing that ever happened to them. There are people who will tell you I'm an amazing businessman. People who tell you I know nothing about business, people who tell you that I'm nice. People who tell you that I'm awful. Every single one of them is right. And you will drive yourself insane trying to control all of the different thousands of narratives that exist about you and other people's lives. I cannot control any other narrative or perception of a person of of my my person, except for the one that's here with me right now, in this moment. I can control how I see myself. I can control how I speak. I can control the pride that I feel in myself. I can control the level of authenticity that I show up inside of. I can control the code that I choose to live by. And if I live by that code, I don't have to worry about what other people's version of me is, because my version of me is so sound. That is what authenticity will do for you. It doesn't just grow you a cult like following, it also heals the aspects of you that feel like you always have to control people's perception of you. You remove the mask, and when you remove the mask, yeah, people actually will be able to hate the real version of you. But they'll also finally be able to love the real version of you. And that is actually scarier than being hated. We don't fear people hating us. We fear somebody seeing who we really are and loving us because we still haven't learned to fully do that. And I know you haven't learned to fully do that, otherwise you wouldn't have the mask on right now. So you can say all the right things. You can say I know I do this and I love myself and I love is action oriented. If you say I love who I am and then you put a filter on yourself for social media that is opposite an act of love, that is an act of self abandonment, that is I sure I love myself, but in order for me to be accepted by the world, I must put on the mask. I must become this alias. I must become the character that people know me to be. That is not true. That's a delusion of the ego that is keeping you stuck and it's keeping you from having a following that will die for you. I've spoken about this plenty of times. Why Authenticity Trumps Follower Count and Vanity Metrics We had a massive increase of followers on Instagram and TikTok the last half of last year and my engagement's the exact same. I went from like 60 low 60s maybe like 62 K followers on Instagram to 104 as of today, 104,000 as of today. My engagement, the the views that I get are nowhere higher than they were when I was at 60 K views maybe a little bit, a little bit of a couple. I've maybe more pieces of content that pop off a little bit more now. But the average, the average view of my content is 4 to 6000 views maybe maybe 6 is more of my floor now that I'm scrolling a bit. But the average views I get a 6000. That's 6% of my following is viewing my stuff. And a lot of those followers are from people not following me. That's the whole point I'm trying to get at here. It's not about going viral. It's not about getting a ton of views. It's not about getting a ton of likes. It's not about any of that. It's about prioritizing the people that are currently in your circle and allowing them to see you for who you really are. You were, you were asking all of these people to take a risk. We're asking all of these people to trust us. Hey, pay me money. Put yourself in a slightly more aggressively leveraged position financially and test your own safety and and really see what you're made of. But I'm not going to put anything. I'm not going to put my neck out at all. I don't want to do that. I'm going to take zero risk because I'm going to be somebody that I'm not. But I'm going to ask you to take all of this risk on me on a version of me that you don't even really know. I see that as a huge disconnect. Stop Copying Trends: Authenticity is the Absence of Technique That's how most of the business industry is, is created these quote UN quote mentors. The fuck that means are telling you go click on trending hashtags, find the top performing videos in your niche, find the trending videos, recreate them. Basically go find what other people are doing and copy them. That's the craziest advice I've ever heard. No wonder people sit here and come to me and say Nick how do I how do I be authentic? When somebody says how do you be more authentic, you are asking how do I be myself? There is no answer to that. Authenticity is not a technique. It is the absence of all technique. It is the full permission to do what feels good for you in the moment. Now, there's obviously a nuance to that because if you want to be successful, you're going to have to get up on days that it feels hard and you're going to have to do it anyways. But if you sit here and say, we just had to, I had a conversation with a client in my higher tier program last night on our group call and he said, man, I'm in another container as well. And all they tell me to do is create these trending videos. And you said I hate it. I hate it. And I said, dude, listen to yourself. If you hate it, why are you doing it? Is it working? No, right. Because you hate it. Because if you can give yourself permission to do the thing in a way that you love it. If you can give yourself permission to create content and run your business in a way that brings you joy, you will continue to do it more. You will find your flow, you will have more passion, you will have more creativity. But if you always feel to yourself and you always try to be something that you're not or be what you think you're supposed to be, you will always be met with resistance, with judgement, with fear, with anxiety, with a creative block and everything in between. Very few people talk about what I'm talking about because they don't know how to create it for others. People say I know how to create a brand for myself and I'm going to teach you exactly how I created the brand for myself. And if it doesn't work for you, it's because you're just not working hard enough. It's because you need more volume. Oh, your your business isn't growing the same way that I grew mine? Well, you need to send more DMS then you need to increase your ad spend. You need to post 10 times a day on social media. Instead, you need to send out more. No, volume is not the answer. Depth is. Volume is not the answer, authenticity is. Posting every perfect piece of content is not the answer. Being unhinged as fuck so that people realize you are a real human like them. That is where the sauce is. But you're too afraid to let yourself be seen. And yet you expect the sea of people to come frothing at the mouth to follow you when you have nowhere to lead them. That is real. Prioritize Connection and Create Content from the Heart If you are building a business, a social following, a message, a mission, or a movement from a place of inauthenticity, you are building everything on a lie. Which means you are leading people nowhere. Of course you don't feel super passionate about what you're talking about. Of course you lack conviction to open your phone and talk about shit that matters. You don't know what matters to you. You're talking about what you think is supposed to matter to other people. Well, this is what's going to get people to buy from me. Fuck that noise. The second you think about your presence, your message in that lens, what do I have to say that's going to get people to buy for me? You've already lost. If you focus too much on the conversion and you don't focus on the connection, you will not have either of them. If you solely focus on the connection, the conversion will always take care of itself. And I know it's backwards. I know nobody else talks like this. I know everybody is sitting here telling you how to go on AI and how to create a script and how to do a funnel and top, middle, top, middle, bottom funnel content, get people a resource, get the 1A sales call because it totally great. That all works. That's awesome. But what if you were able to show up in a way that made people want to do all of that by themselves? What if instead of sitting here and strategizing and systemizing everything to the point where you have no creative flow, you just let the entire system crumble of what you think you're supposed to be doing? And you allowed yourself to just be fully fucking present in what you were doing and let that be enough? I don't have, I mean, I, I have top funnel, bottom funnel shit. None of my content is seen through that lens. I do not pull out my phone and think I need to make top of funnel content today. Hmm, I need to make bottom of fuddle content today. No, I pick up my phone and I say, what is a message that's on my heart right now for the person in my audience who needs it? What's alive for me right now? What is true for me right now in this moment because as if I am living in integrity. If I am The Walking embodiment of what I say I am and what I sell for people. And I'm the number one thing I teach is identity, energy, leadership. Those are the things that scale everything put in culture and we've got the we've got the trio. So when I sit here and I say I am changing my identity in real time, I am the $10 million CEO. That's who I am. Now. Everything that I do is from the identity of the $10 million CEO. The $10 million CEO is authentic as fuck. That's who he is. That's who I am as the $10 million CEO. So I say in this moment, if I've been living in accordance to who I say I am, my intuition, my downloads, my thoughts are going to be exactly what I need to get out in that moment to curate that reality for myself. But if I sit here and say, oh, I really want to talk about this, but oh gosh, how do I make this into a perfect hook and deliver the value? You are never going to take enough action and have enough reps to get good at it. You go oh I can't pick up my phone 'cause when I pick up my phone and talk I I blank out good post it. Literally post it. Post a video of you talking and blanking out with a 32nd gap in between. Just edit the gap out. It's not that complicated but you're convincing yourself you need to be perfect in order to post. That's the same trauma that was instilled in you by your parents. If you're not perfect, if you don't perform, you don't get praise. If the external world doesn't acknowledge what you've done, then what you've done is not good enough. I just had this conversation last night. I was guest speaking on, on my buddy Michael's group call with his people. And one of these, one of his members said, you know, I, I feel really good about a message and then I post it and then I don't get these vanity metrics. I don't get the views, I don't get the likes. And then I kind of, you know, get in my head. And so I said, OK, So what happened? What you're saying is I feel really good about a message that's on my heart right now, and I'm going to speak it and I'm going to post it, but if the world doesn't like it as much as I like it, then I'm going to convince myself that that thing is bad. That doesn't make any sense. Lead with Your Conviction: Don't Be a Follower of Trends If I like what I'm talking about, if I remove the need for the social media metrics or the vanity metrics or the clients, if I remove the need for that to be my confirmation and I allow my confirmation to simply be, is this what I love to talk about? Do I think this is a good piece of content? Do I watch it back and say, fuck yeah, I nailed that. I let that be the North Star because my conviction is going to start to build. I'm going to start to like what I'm talking about more and more. And my conviction in what I'm speaking about consistently, that is what convinces other people to care about it. But if every time I say, oh, this is a really good message and I film it and I post it and it gets barely any likes, I go shoot, OK, that's not what I liked. OK, what about this message? Ah, no, they didn't like that either. OK, let me find something completely new to talk about that is backwards. That's not you innovating. That's not you being a thought leader. That's not you being a leader at all. That's you being a follower. Hey world, tell me what version of me you accept. No, I accept this version of me. This is who I am. I am the guy who thinks this way. I am the guy who has this view. I am the guy who's not going to tolerate trans trans agenda. I am the guy who's not going to deal with pronouns. I am the guy who thinks this. I am the guy who thinks that if you're overweight, you're not taking yourself seriously and therefore I shouldn't take you seriously either. I don't mean that in a way that says I think lesser of somebody who's overweight. I know they think lesser of themselves. I know they don't commit to things that they that they that they don't commit to their word. Why would I trust you if you give me a promise if you're in that state? I simply would not. That is who I am. That's how I view the world. That's the way my brain works. If you don't like it, quite literally, fuck off. Cool, love. You mean it, but don't care. What is that for you? What are those hills you're willing to die on? What are the things of how you view the world? And you say, man, if only everybody saw this the way that I saw it. How do people not see it the way that I see it? And if you do, if you do see it that way, great. This is the space for you. If you don't see it that way, awesome. This isn't the space for you. Build a New World: The Integrity of a True Cult Leader You have to think about if, if I want a cult following, who are people following? Are they following somebody who's trying to be liked by everybody, or are they following somebody who's trying to make a difference in this world? Are they following somebody who's just living beneath the system, or are they following somebody who wants to tear the entire fucking system down and build a new one? I'm not just existing in the world. I'm trying to create a new one. I'm trying to, I'm trying to create a whole new world of entrepreneurship. I'm trying to bring that that spirituality and that consciousness back, the humanness back. I want to bring the authenticity back, the heart back to what entrepreneurship used to be. That's my world that I'm building. What's the world you're building? Because if you were going to build a new world, you have to tear down an old world first before creation comes destruction. Who are your people following? Do they know? Do they really know you? If they don't, if your answer is no, then you don't have the scaffolding yet to build a cult like following. Because in order to have a cult, you must be a cult leader. And if anybody knows about being called a cult leader, it's me. I've been called a cult leader for years. Because what I talk about is polarizing. And when people come into our world, they are bought in. They're here to stay. Because what they saw is what they got, what they thought was going to be on the inside. It was better. It wasn't. Man. Nick is one way online and he's different inside his content. Nope. Nobody has. Nobody is ever able to say that. Nobody's ever going to meet me in person and say, God, he's way different online. He's not who he is. He's not who he says he is. It's the opposite, man. He is even more authentic in person. All of his beliefs, all of the views, everything he talks about, he lives that. Would people say that about you? Would they really? You think? Oh, no, yeah, totally. If I followed you around, if I was your ideal client and I followed you around for an entire day, actually, let's call it an entire week. If I followed you around for an entire week and I just got to observe what you do with your free time, how much you're on your phone, the language that you speak, how you take care of yourself, how much you work, how you talk about other people. At the end of that week, would I say this is the person that I need to hire to guide me to change my life? Or would I say this person is nowhere near what they say they are online? That answer right there will show you exactly what you need to change about yourself, exactly how you need to show up differently, exactly how you need to start presenting yourself. The Power of Naked Authenticity: Defying Cancellation There is a lot of false fear around showing up online authentically, but it's false. The most powerful place you can be is completely naked in front of everyone. That is the most powerful position to stand on because if you are somebody who walks into a room and you have nothing to hide, you are free. If you open up your phone and you go to talk and you have nothing to hide, you are unstoppable. People still try to cancel me all the time. I had a guy, but couple weeks ago took a video of me saying the the my take on overweight entrepreneurs and he's like, I had a couple 100,000 followers. All these hate comments, everybody's going crazy in his comment section. And I just pop in there. I'm like, I mean, yeah, it's literally exactly what I said and everyone's commenting back to me, but none of them came to my page. None of them commented on my stuff. You know why? Because my entire following goes, yeah, that's Nick's view. We know that's Nick's view, and because they all know it, how could somebody possibly cancel me for it? Because I let people know where I stand. Because people see my heart, Because people know my mind, Because people know what I'm about. The people who are in my audience have chosen to be there because they trust me, because they actually know who I am. And sure, I lost followers for a good while. I was constantly losing followers for about 3 years. My page did not grow past 62 K for three years. I would gain some and I would lose more and I'd gain more than I would lose more. And it was constantly, constantly just wedding people out. And I decided to create the story that people unfollowing me was a good thing. Everybody thinks the opposite. I don't want to lose followers if I start being myself. You're not losing followers. Those people never actually follows you. Those people probably are never going to buy from you. They were never supporting you. They were there because of a lie. Why would I want to keep things in my life that were built on a lie? If I'm going to be authentic, if I'm going to be fully myself, then my entire life you needs to emulate that. Aligning Actions with Identity: My TRT Integrity Example This is a big part of I've talked about this like maybe twice on social media. This is a big part of why I actually came off of TRT about six weeks ago. I had been for this. You don't know. I was a bodybuilder for a decade. I did my first steroid cycle when I was 24 and ever since then I did plenty of cycles when I was competing and stuff. But ever since I was 24 I've never fully come off of at least having testosterone in. So I remember for the last like 2 years, I was on 150 tests a week. So it wasn't anything substantial. But as I started creating the new identity for myself, I am the $10 million CEO, I will build a $100 million organic brand. This is my path, this is who I am, this is what I'm about. I realized there's still 1 aspect of me that's not fully organic. And I know it sounds silly. I know some people would think thank God it's not that big of a deal. But to me, in the moment it was. I'm not saying I'll never be on TRT again, but I looked down one day as I was putting the insulin syringe in to inject my test and I went, oh fuck. I'm, I'm out of alignment right now. I don't need this. I'm doing this for a vanity metric right now. I'm doing this to because it's easier for me to get away with stuff. I can cheat a little bit more on my diet. I don't have to train as hard in the gym. I'm, I have this variable in my life that's allowing me to coast $10 million CEO doesn't coast. I'm not looking for the easy way. I'm not looking for the shortcut. I'm looking to build things that last don't want my body to be the same thing because my body is my first business card. OK, got it. So I stopped and then six weeks off, I feel great energy comes and goes, but I'm it's the story I've assigned to it. I am the $10 million CEO. Everything about me is 100% organic now, you know, etcetera, etcetera. So there's this, this aspect of me. I I could have never told anybody that. I could have stayed on 150 tests. Now, it's not like I have this crazy bodybuilding physique. Most people wouldn't have even noticed. But that was an integrity thing with me. I'm the cult leader. I am the $10 million CEO. I am the man leading my movement. I have to be able to look at myself in the mirror. I have to be able to look at myself in the eye and feel no need to look away. And if you can do that, you can stare at yourself in the eye without feeling the need to look away. That is true freedom. Nothing to hide, everything to see, everything to gain. That's when you'll step fully into the version of you that you need to be to create this cult following. Your Assignment: Take the Challenge, Be Seen, Be Yourself So my invitation for you all is to take this is to do the lower down sickness challenge. 30 less than 30 seconds. RIP a talking head 100 days hashtag lower down sickness challenge. Tag me in them. I'm scrolling through. I'm looking at them all day. They're so funny. Some people are already going crazy viral. A couple people have 100K plus views already. It's only been a couple days. People with completely dead accounts going viral because authenticity is the way it is always been. The way. I will help you outperform ads. I will. I will make you never have to buy an ad again if you do this right. So I invite you all to do that challenge. I invite you all to take it seriously. I invite you all to go all in. Let yourself be seen. Drop the filter. Stop being who your family convinces you that you need to be. Stop being who you've convinced yourself you need to be. Pull the fucking mask off, Be yourself and watch what happens. In 100 days. I'll see you guys on the other side.